1) Soaring Tigers, battling Bulls

It was a Super League weekend of significant home wins. First Huddersfield, completing a double against Wigan to hint at a return to last season’s form. Then Warrington, with surely their best result of a stuttering spring against Leeds.

Finally, on Sunday, Bradford and Castleford completed the quartet. The importance of Bradford’s victory over Wakefield is obvious. Defeat, and the Bulls would have been cut nine points adrift at the bottom of the table, and almost certainly doomed to relegation with London Broncos. But the victory – Bradford’s fourth of the season, it should be noted, the same number as Wakefield and Salford – reduced their deficit to six points. This came at the start of a week in which they hope to be given back at least a couple more by the independent panel convened to consider the validity of the maximum six-point deduction imposed on them in February for entering administration.

With home games coming up against Hull KR and the Catalans, and a trip to Salford on Sunday week, the Bulls are anything but dead. But it isn’t only Wakefield they have in their sights. A win at Salford would lift them to within five points of the Red Devils, irrespective of any point restoration – and the whiff of crisis grows stronger by the week from Barton, with crowds and credibility dwindling.

Anyway, that’s enough of the basement. Castleford’s emphatic win against Hull KR must be seen as the clearest signal yet that the Tigers really can maintain for the whole season what many initially dismissed as a flying start and finish in the top four. That would be a truly remarkable achievement, and a neat answer to those who regularly dismiss the Super League as oh so predictable.

2) Cry-baby Cougars

This weekend the Tigers have a distraction, as they go to Wigan in the pick of the Challenge Cup quarter-finals, which will be televised live on the BBC on Saturday afternoon. The loss of Justin Carney would seem to be a savage blow to Castleford’s chances, especially with Wigan expecting several senior players back from injury for the biggest game of their season so far. But Cas will have plenty of support at the DW Stadium, which should hopefully make it a proper cup occasion.

It sounds like Warrington will also travel in good numbers to Odsal on Sunday for the BBC’s other televised tie of the weekend against Bradford, and Leigh are relishing the prospect of a Friday night out at Headingley to demonstrate to a wider audience the huge strides they have made over the past eight or nine months.

But Keighley’s attitude to their quarter-final at Widnes has been pathetic. Paul March, their player coach, says he will make 10 changes to the team that lost to Halifax in the Championship last weekend, because avoiding relegation has to be the club’s greater priority. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that March is still sulking as a result of the two-month stadium ban imposed for verbal abuse of a match official – there seems to be a lot of that about. But the players who miss out will be deprived of a big night, and a rare opportunity for part-timers to play in a cup quarter-final. March and Keighley should really be served with another disrepute charge.

3) National embarrassment

Not that the governing body should be immune from criticism. This week’s announcement of an England training squad for the Four Nations series in Australia and New Zealand at the end of the season was a reminder of the absurd decision to retain Steve McNamara as the national coach despite last year’s accident-prone World Cup campaign. Added to this is the fact that he is currently based in Australia – as a low-profile assistant at the Sydney Roosters. Whatever you think about McNamara’s coaching credentials, this situation is an unnecessary humiliation for British rugby league.

4) Our friends in the south

That said, there was another reminder this week that the best advertisement for rugby league in England remains the strength of rugby league in Australia. When the NRL bigwigs feel confident enough to announce that the second game of next year’s State of Origin series will be played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground – a monstrous arena in the heart of Aussie Rules territory – then something is clearly going right.

The Origin concept could have had no better endorsement than the first game of the 2014 series, won heroically by New South Wales who now have the chance to end eight years of Queensland dominance on home territory in Sydney later this month.

I hadn’t realised there was a commitment to take one of the three Origin games on the road every third year, with suggestions that a match in 2018 could be moved to Perth – where South Sydney will face New Zealand Warriors this weekend in another example of the NRL’s evangelical mood – or even, whisper it very quietly, England.

The Aussies aren’t quite as bad as we sometimes paint them, although the decision to sell UK television rights to Origin as part of the NRL bundle to Premier Sports, for a few extra dollars but at the expense of the additional exposure that could have been gained through Sky or even BT Sport, was a glaring example of the lack of a big international vision.

However, the England national team should continue to benefit from the growing strength of the NRL, with the Cumbrian prop Lee Mossop finally due to make his Parramatta debut this weekend, and his former Wigan team-mate Sam Tomkins making an increasingly positive impression with the Warriors.

It will be fascinating to see how he does against the Burgess boys in Perth, and the presence of so many key England men in the NRL would be a good argument for having someone like McNamara involved with the national set-up. But only as an assistant. Is it too late for him to reverse roles with Castleford’s Daryl Powell?

5) All hail the hookers

Time to hand out a couple of bouquets to two Cheshire-based hookers who have recently announced they will retire at the end of the season. Michael Monaghan, the nuggety Aussie who is in his seventh season with Warrington, has been one of my favourite Super League players for years. Since his Wolves debut, in fact, when he made a number of classy contributions to a big opening-night win against Hull, from memory, and was tipped to be Man of Steel by the BBC’s Dave Woods. He’s never quite managed to be consistently dominant enough for that, undermined initially by Warrington’s inability to compete across the park with the big boys, and more recently by the injuries that have forced him to call it a day. But the part he played in dismantling St Helens at the Etihad recently was a reminder of the creativity and skill he aligns with courage and toughness.

Jon Clarke has many of the same attributes, even if he would concede that he does not have quite the natural playmaking ability of Monaghan (whose hinterland includes an appearance in the 2007 NRL Grand Final for Manly), which arguably makes his achievements all the more admirable. Certainly he has had to reinvent himself since a flying start to his career with Wigan turned horribly sour when he was omitted from their team for the first Super League Grand Final of 1998 and was arrested that night, leading to a custodial sentence. He had a stint in London but it was at Warrington, under first Paul Cullen then Tony Smith, that Clarke re-emerged as a hooker good enough to play in Great Britain’s last series against New Zealand in 2007 – while off the field, he graduated last year with a BA in sport and exercise science from the University of Chester. He has also given excellent service to Widnes after being signed by Denis Betts, a former Wigan team-mate, as the right sort of bloke around whom to build. And as of next Monday morning, both he and Monaghan could be 80 minutes away from a Wembley swansong. What price a Widnes-Warrington Challenge Cup semi?

6) Far and wide

As many of you have noted, this is the first Set of Six for a while, for which apologies. But in the three weeks or so since the last one appeared, I’ve been struck by the steady drip of good-news emails and press releases, mostly from places where the existence of league is a pretty closely guarded secret.

So if you want to cheer yourself up with a reminder of the progress the game has made over the past few years, have a read through this lot.

Staying with the Midlands, Coventry Bears seem to be on course to take their place in the third tier of the professional ranks next season, which will mean competing with a combination of familiar rugby league names – as things currently stand, Workington, Rochdale, Barrow, Swinton, York and Oldham – as well as the more established clubs from development areas who have already gained varying degrees of experience.

As Gavin Willacy noted in a recent No Helmets Required blog, London Skolars are currently enjoying a spell at Enfield FC’s Donkey Lane, with its lovely art deco stand, before they return to the New River Stadium in August when a 4G pitch will have been installed for their annual Friday Night Lights celebration the night before the Challenge Cup final, with Hunslet given the honour of providing this year’s opposition. This weekend in Enfield the Skolars face the South Wales Scorpions, who are preparing to celebrate their 100th match later this month.

At lower levels, London Broncos hosted a successful coaching seminar for some of the community clubs with whom they are at last starting to forge closer links, and the various Summer Conference competitions continue on their merry way, with recent derbies between Somerset and Gloucestershire, North Devon and Cornwall, and many more.